23rd Sunday Year B

See Commentary on Mark 7:31-37


Homily 1 - 2006

This past week or so the media have had a bonanza: Don Chipp – "Keep the bastards honest!" – died; then Steve Irwin - in spectacular circumstances, and yesterday, Peter Brock was also tragically killed.  The popular outpouring of emotion has been considerable.

During his pontificate Pope John Paul II canonised a whole sack of saints. With a few exceptions, no one seems to have been particularly inspired by any of them, even though apparently they were all heroically virtuous.

Somehow, personal sanctity did not seem to figure much with Jesus. He was always saying: Your faith has saved you, your readiness to trust, not yourself or your performance (that was the Pharisees’ ploy!), but to trust the power of God.  What mattered was not perfection. He didn’t say: Your faith in God has made you perfect, but: Your faith has saved you, has made you safe ... your trusting God has made you safe, God has made you safe. Perhaps that’s all that matters.  (Peter, in some things, was a disaster. Paul had his problems. But they let God love them, and ultimately that is all they worried about.)

Interestingly we can be inspired by people with clay feet, perhaps more easily than by those who seem perfect. Most of us with any experience under our belts can agree that it is honesty, indeed often the trusting sharing of our weaknesses, that draws us powerfully into intimacy... Simply because it is real.

The institutional Church shies away from facing its shadow, and so ... the knee-jerk reaction to sin has been to cover up. We are not good at naming our own sin.  As a priest I feel a strong pressure to strive to be perfect, and, if I can’t be perfect, at least to look perfect, and the thought of being found vulnerable can be quite scary.  Church leaders can sometimes seem to adopt the moral high-ground and even aggressively insist on their monopoly on moral truth ... with the result that most people take little notice of what the Church says, and even seem instinctively to resist it.

We have, in fact, precious insights into human dignity, and a respected tradition of clear thinking in areas of morality and social justice. Yet in the upcoming conscience vote in Parliament on the issue of embryonic stem cell research, how many will be open to the Church’s message?

The Gospel today presented us with a Gentile unable to hear – anything, unable to speak, to share an idea, an opinion, a preference – isolated from ordinary social conversation, oblivious to so much going on between people, inevitably consigned to the margins.

Jesus took him aside, away from the crowd, and made him the centre of his attention; he then gave him some idea of what he might do: by touching his ears and his tongue, with his spittle (which in the culture of the day was seen as a healing agent), he signed language to the deaf and dumb man the possibility of healing. What might have gone on in that man’s heart? - the beginning of hope? - the possibility of trust? perhaps blocked, held back by uncertainty, confusion, and fear. And then Jesus said: Be opened!  Nothing about Be perfect. Open up; Be freed; Let the hope, the trust, flow free.

We need to forget our own virtue, and no longer to rely on our own performance. We need to focus on God - the one who saves, who loves unconditionally.  We need to face reality – with all our ambiguity, with our goodness and our badness, with our “already” and our “not yet”. We need to hope, to trust; and surprisingly, to the extent that we let God’s love flow into us, we are changed. We, too, begin to act lovingly. We become compassionate, like our heavenly Father.


Homily 2 - 2015

For the coming Year of Mercy, Pope Francis will grant to all priests the power to forgive in Confession people who have committed the sin of abortion. [Up until now, Canon Law has restricted the power to bishops only.] It is not that Pope Francis is going soft on abortion, but, like Jesus before him, he has listened instinctively to people’s hearts and has heard in some, at least, the panic and despair from which their sin proceeds.

I have been thinking of the Pope’s initiative in the light of today’s Gospel. Jesus healed a man who was both deaf and dumb. In recounting the incident, Mark mentioned that Jesus sighed before performing his healing – probably because he saw in the man’s disability one further indication of the brokenness of our world. Deafness particularly excluded the man from human conversation and meaningful communication, leaving him effectively isolated. After the incident Jesus ordered the bystanders to tell no one about it – probably because they were enthusiastic for the wrong reasons. This was magic! This was great! Someone like that was just what they needed! For them, Jesus was a celebrity; for him, that was the last thing he wanted.

From time to time in the Gospels Jesus repeated the lament of Isaiah, ‘They have eyes that do not see, ears that do not hear', and perhaps we could add, 'mouths that do not speak'. What was Jesus referring to? For him, what would give life to a sin-scarred world was not just to hear and to speak [Most people already do that.], but to hear and to speak with love.

I believe that one, among many, of the factors affecting the Church’s virtual irrelevance in today’s world is that we have not always spoken with obvious love, compassion and hope. Nor have we listened firstly with love, wanting to understand and to hear the hearts of others before ever opening our mouths to speak. One of the reasons why Pope Francis is so willingly listened to is because people see him as one who has listened to and connected with their hearts, and who then speaks with mercy and compassion. He listens and speaks with love.

In today’s Western World, authority drawn from status or coercive or legal power has lost its clout. People will not listen to Popes or Bishops or priests, even parents, simply because of their role. There is no way we can successfully impose on others what we think is right. There was a time when the Church enjoyed some status, when it could muster a reasonably disciplined voting bloc. Those days have largely gone. We are back to the days of the early Church when Christians had no coercive power and no measurable influence at all on government and legislation. They simply lived, and were seen to live, what they believed. And what they believed, above all, was the mercy of God.

In this Western world, our authority will be in proportion to our witness. No longer can we count on shortcuts to impose social conformity. We can rely solely on the witness value of our lives.  That is not bad news, but good news. However, it does call for continuing and radical conversion, firstly, from us. We need to learn to listen with love. We need to learn to speak with love – and, despite wonderful exceptions, we are not good at that.

I believe that in order to be able to listen with love and to speak with love, we must firstly make room in our lives for silence. In our super-busy lives, in this ever-chattering world, we must prioritise silence – or we have no chance to listen and to speak with love. Love grows out of silence. Even just any prayer is not enough. I believe there is need in our lives also for silent prayer. The word “contemplation” may be unfamiliar and the prospect daunting, yet it is precisely to that that Pope Francis calls us all.


Homily 3 - 2021

Jesus had been making a sweep through pagan territory bordering on Galilee. His purpose seems not so much to have been to preach there the Kingdom of God as, perhaps, to give himself some “head space” after engaging with scribes and Pharisees from Jerusalem. While in pagan territory, he had encountered a Syrophoenician woman who had begged him to cast out a devil oppressing her daughter. Though at first Jesus was apparently reluctant, she had eventually changed Jesus’ mind and he graciously yielded to her pleading.

In today’s incident, some pagan friends of a pagan man suffering from deafness and dumbness implored Jesus to “lay his [healing] hand” on their friend. This time, Jesus promptly acceded to their request and healed the man.

For Mark, the man’s affliction symbolised a situation too often existing in his own Christian community — and, by extension, among his later readers such as ourselves. We can all so easily fail truly to “hear” the message of Jesus, to read his heart, to share his values and his urgency. So often, as the cause of our deafness to his message, lies the profound, homogenising but unnoticed influence on us of our surrounding culture. Jesus led the deaf man “away from the crowd” and connected with him personally “in private”. We need to give Jesus time to be alone with us — and to hear his wonderful plea to us, “Be opened!”. He yearns that we open our hearts, and allow the two of us truly to engage with each other firstly in trusting silence, so that later we have the courage and the wisdom to “speak clearly”  to our confused and confusing world.